Subj: War Drums From Israel - Part 1
Date: 7/13/2001 9:41:04 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: MERL@MiddleEast.Org (MER)
Reply-to: MER@MiddleEast.Org
To: MERL@MiddleEast.Org (MER)

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PREPARING FOR THE WAR OF HIS CHOOSING

By Baruch Kimmerling

"...maybe five more minutes

left to still the tom-toms of war."

[Ha'aretz - 12 July]:
What we feared has come true: Two ethno-national groups, living in
each other's backyards, are going through a process of regression to
superstitious tribalism. The sounds of the drums are heard throughout
the land calling both tribes to gather around the campfire, dress in the
colors of war and head out to battle to eliminate the very last member
of the other side. There's no left, no right - we're all Jews. There's no
Fatah, Hamas, or Popular Front - they're all Arabs, Palestinians and
Muslims, and shaheeds (martyrs) - and to hell with the price of war.In
this kind of war, more than in any other kind of war, the difference
between the front and the rear dissolves, as do the distinctions
between soldier and civilian, child and adult, victim and victimizer.

Even those who say it's not their war, just a march of folly and evil,
aren't immune, either to the terror attacks or to the draft, because
they belong to the tribe and because of the social pressure and the
distorted way the social and political "reality" is constructed and
presented. At this stage in the script war appears an unavoidable fate
and all it will take to spark the third Jewish-Palestinian war (after the
first in 1948 and the second in 1982) is one more terrorist massacre
to finally legitimize the all-out attack. And Israel isn't leaving even that
to chance, since the "assassination policy" or "active defense" or
whatever it's called in our Orwellian language, only provokes the
Palestinian urge for revenge.

The settlers and spokesmen of the right are absolutely correct when
they say Ariel Sharon was not elected by them to to make any
agreement with the Palestinians or to be "restrained." Sharon was
elected to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, to bury, once and for
all, any chance of reconciliation with the Palestinians, and to continue
the acquisition of Judea and Samaria for the Jews. Sharon knows this
well, and there's no reason to believe that he doesn't plan to satisfy
their aspirations, which are also his aspirations. But Sharon circa
2001 is a much more experienced and improved version of the 1982
model. He learned the lesson that one doesn't go to war simply
because one chooses to, and like his spiritual forefathers in the Mapai
and Ahdut Avoda political parties, he's building, with superb tactics
and admirable patience, a domestic and international consensus for a
war he knows will be cost many casualties, a war that won't come
cheap for the Israeli side, and a war that could turn into an
international catastrophe.

Domestically, he's been a dizzying success, so far. True, he received
some generous assistance from Ehud Barak and Shlomo Ben-Ami -
and from Bill Clinton. Each for their own reasons threw the entire
blame for their failure onto the Palestinians and didn't ask what
mistakes they made at Camp David, claiming "Israel doesn't have a
partner for peace." That declaration alone paralyzed the Israeli peace
camp even though as time goes by it becomes clearer and clearer that
the Barak-Clinton offer was indeed the most generous ever officially
made to the Palestinians, but it was also less generous than was
claimed or leaked. Indeed, it presented to the Palestinians impossible
terms on which to agree to an "end to the conflict." Among other
things the Israeli proposals at Camp David called for annexing 12
percent of the territories with nothing, in return, for the Palestinians.
Then the Americans said Israel was ready for 9 percent, plus one
percent, apparently from the Halutza dunes, but Israel refused to
make any concrete commitment to evacuate settlements.

Furthermore, Israel demanded a supervisory role over the border
crossings into the future Palestinian state and, according to the map
presented to the Palestinians, Israel wanted two settlement blocs that
in effect cut the West Bank into pieces. Essentially, the Israeli offers
by Barak (and even others less "generous") could have been a good
basis for negotiations, as the details were worked out and the peoples
on both sides learned to accept them, were it not for the fact that
Barak and Clinton were restricted by impossible time-tables and
were under pressure to reach immediate, dramatic results. Clinton,
remember, was in his last month of office and wanted a grand
departure from the international stage. Barak, out of inexperience and
coalition pressure, set himself a time-table that was impossible to
keep.

To cover up their failures, it was convenient for Clinton and Barak to
lay the full blame at Arafat's feet. Thus, it is now clear that the way
the Israeli proposals were presented was a fraud perpetrated on the
Israeli - and international - public opinions. There wasn't even a
conspiracy, but the failure of the talks and the way they failed were
one of the main reasons for the outbreak of violence by the
Palestinians. The failure of the negotiations, the way the failure was
presented and the violent Palestinian reaction rapidly changed public
opinion, paralyzed the peace camp and caused confusion and
embarrassment among its spiritual and intellectual shepherds.

These contributing factors not only won Sharon the elections but
worse, created a vacuum of political and ideological opposition that
resulted in unprecedented dominance of the political scene by the
radical religious and secular right - so much so that now it seems
there's nobody and nothing that can stop the slide down the slippery
slope to total conflict.

It appears the public will only sober up at 5 P.M. after the war.
Nonetheless, it seems that right now there are maybe five more
minutes left to still the tom-toms of war. Let's make Sharon
understand that we know that this won't only be a war of our
choosing, but also an evil colonial one

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